Yap, Federated States of MicronesiaReviving the Sacred Machi:Power, Gender, and Cultural preservation on Fais Island

During the past five years, a remarkable experiment in cultural preservation has been underway on Fais Island in the Yap Outer Islands. The project involves reviving the traditional production of a type of ceremonial weaving, called machi, which is considered sacred in Fais culture. In this talk I’m going to describe how this project developed, and some of the problems and paradoxes it encountered. Let me first give you a general description of Fais Island, and some understanding of the unique role that the machi plays in Fais history and culture.
Fais is a tiny, raised coral island about a mile and a half long and three-quarters of a mile wide. It’s roughly the size of UOG campus plus GWHS campus, times 2. Everyone lives in a cluster of houses along the southern shore of the island. Recent archaeological studies have shown that this little village was settled nearly 2,000 years ago and has been occupied continuously since then. Today about 300 people reside on Fais, and another 100 or more Fais Islanders live in Yap, about 170 miles to the west.
Fais lies within a great archipelago of low coral islands and atolls that extend nearly a thousand miles between the mountainous islands of Yap to the west, and Chuuk Lagoon to the east. The Yap Outer Islanders are know as Re-Mathau or “People of the Sea”. Inhabitants of these small coral islands developed extraordinary skills as long-distance seafarers and navigators. They constructed superbly seaworthy outrigger canoes, and they routinely traveled hundreds of miles from island to island within the archipelago, or even longer distances to Guam and the northern Mariana Islands, to the Philippines, and to Palau. The islanders’ survival depended upon their knowledge of ocean navigation and their ability to maintain long-distance trade relations. This navigational knowledge and sailing ability assured them of alternative sources of support and food resources after the typhoons and droughts that periodically ravage gardens and homes on these low-lying islands.
Relations between the fifteen or so Outer Islands and the main island of Yap became formalized perhaps five hundred years ago into what is now known as the “Yap Empire,” which is actually not an empire, but a system of inter-island trade and tribute linking the low outer islands with the high island of Yap. Once every two or three years, chiefs’ emissaries from each of the low coral islands, beginning with those farthest east from Yap, sailed west to Yap. At each island along the way, additional outrigger canoes joined the fleet, until the entire armada reached the high island of Yap. The traditional status of each of the outer islands was ranked according to proximity to Yap. So Ulithi and Fais, as the closest islands to Yap, held the highest place among all the outer islands within this political system. Although the Yapese had very limited actual hegemony over the Outer Islanders, the system of trade and tribute provided benefits to both the Yap Islanders and the Outer Islanders.
In Fais culture, the machi is intimately associated with chieftainship. It belongs to a small class of objects known as bwalungal tamol, literally “perquisites of the chief.”. This includes mainly a few species of marine animals considered tabu by Fais Islanders, such as sea turtles, whales, and dolphins, which must be brought to the island chief. Within this special class of objects that are considered the rightful property of the chief, the machi is the only item of local manufacture. This intrinsic linkage between machi and the status of island chief underlies much of the paradox and problems in recent attempts at cultural revival and preservation of the machi on Fais. The machi is similar in this way to the heirloom “fine mats” of Tonga and Samoa, and to comparable “chiefly objects” of other Micronesian and Polynesian societies. All these objects embody chiefly power and prestige, and are considered to some degree as the inalienable possession of the island’s paramount chief.
The machi occupied a much more prominent place in Fais Island rituals and religion sixty years ago, before the Fais people converted to Christianity just after World War II. Most importantly, the machi was an obligatory annual tribute to the island’s paramount chief, from each of the families which held some chiefly title, which included about half of the 35 or so patrilineal estates on the island. Tribute machi were a special variety, containing an embellished warp stripe down the center of the textile. When the island chief received a tribute machi, he would lay it on the spirit-altar of his house for four days, as an offering to the ancestral spirits. Afterwards it would be carefully folded, wrapped, and put away. Tribute machi of this type were taken aboard the periodic sailing voyages to Yap and presented as tribute to Yapese chiefs. When the tribute voyages to Yap ended in the early decades of the twentieth century, the tribute machi was no longer an obligatory contribution from certain Fais estates to the paramount chief, and production of this variety of machi ceased.